A Gai Shan Life

News, News and News: Non-Trivial Announcements for 2012

2012-02-09T21:37:00.000-08:00

A) One friend is having a baby.

B) One friend is getting married.

C) This blogger got a promotion.

(So I get to rewrite the budget for 2012 again! This is a good thing, yes.)

It's a pretty big step up.

This comes with a new title, a higher level of seniority, more responsibility and visibility, a lot more travel. A couple other things I'm not as in love with but I know I can do. Spiffy. It does come with more money as well, which was pretty important considering that I came in on a lowball offer originally. I've been working intensely to bring myself back to parity and this negotiation was no different.

We're also really looking forward to the changes that will let me make to take care of my health. It doesn't just come with more, more, more, it was built to promote some balance as well. I was also saying no to some things: for my health and for a stronger structure, the position is arranged sensibly to reduce specific burdens that I've already mastered and shift it elsewhere.

It's been a very tough road, not just for me but also for PiC who has had to live with me running on all pistons 100% of the time, and being totally career focused despite my health issues, and then paying the price with my health and I'm really grateful for this outcome.

And on the whole, it's also pretty neat - I've sweated and slaved over the building of this little empire and I'll be able to continue to run it for a while yet.

Fighting the good fight and when bowing out is winning

2012-02-06T21:36:00.000-08:00

I've been watching Jenny, The Bloggess, take the world by Symbolic Red Dress storm, and it's been pretty amazing. The traveling red dress really did start as a red dress, and it really did travel and then it became a magical thing wherein people took the idea and began donating red dresses and all manner of "red dresses" of all shapes, sizes and colors, and offering their services as photographers and generally empowering one another to become stronger people in one way or another.

It's a pretty cool story.

And most recently, in all of the furor, Jenny was offered a finalist's slot for a Health Activist Award. She said: No.

As someone who feels like there are always about twenty different battles to fight or causes to support or banners to uphold, where it's hard to make the choice that's true to yourself and your strength, I felt there was something incredibly smart and good about that "No". It wasn't meant to be, it was just honest. And these days, there are so few people who are willing to do something that could be uncomfortable but honest that I'm impressed by it.

She was willing to forgo an honor and the spotlight because she didn't feel able to do the things required in order to get the goods. She didn't pitch a fit, she didn't use her platform to foment, in fact, she used it to explain why she was begging off, rather apologetically.

"I’m not sure if i was chosen because of my rheumatoid arthritis or my mental illness issues but the latter sort of keeps me from doing web chats or phone calls or any of that. My anxiety is just too strong right now for me to take on anything else. But I’m so honored. If you’d rather give it to someone less crazy than me though I totally understand. I just have to take care of myself a bit more and that means saying no when I want to say yes. I hope you understand."

Really, how can you not smile at that?

In the end, she won the award anyway so begging off made no difference to the result but she did preserve her strength and her sanity which were really truly necessary and what was to be, was.

It's a really nice reminder to me that we all have limited time, space and energy. We all, especially us spoonies, have to be aware of it and be smarter about how we choose to spend any of those things. The external stuff matters but how much we let it affect our choices is really up to us and we should remember that the outside world goes on as it will as we continue our personal journeys.

In the wider world, the need to earn a living to live the life we imagine requires that we make choices to grow and build but sometimes, we have to say no to create space for our lives. There's such beauty in learning the wisdom of saying "thank you, but no" and learning when it's right to say it.

Life is hard but the fight has merit

2012-02-05T00:16:00.000-08:00

When I first reacted to the original post of that blogger, I only intended to comment. Before submitting the comment, though, sanity prevailed.

It dawned on me that no matter how well meaning or well written or persuasive, to an unhearing mind, my words would mean nothing. I had seen how little any kindly meant words were getting through to her both on PopularBlogger's blog and on her own. And the reason I found my way there in the first place was because of the unrelenting negativity and sometimes abuse she showered on PopularBlogger's site on him and his commenters so, even though he and I are incredibly different, I just don't have time for her to bring that into my blog life should she follow my comment back.

So I took my comment, and some grumpitude for the rudeness and assumptions she was spewing, back here to my own blog.

I didn't link to her because I had no intention of giving her publicity by naming her, nor did she have a clue who I was so I didn't intend to open the door for her into my space here. Also, I think it's rude and unprofessional, journalistically speaking, to cite someone's words and name them without linking to them on the Internet. So I avoided identifying someone that, as it turns out, is much more well known than I expected. To be honest, I hadn't heard from RachH and Tom before this post, evidently MW's prodigy is more well known than I am! ;)

You know what they say, controversy sells!

In any case, I'd like to turn this to a more positive light.

After reading more comments, particularly StackingPennies's about the fact that we don't cashier for FUN, I started to laugh. Because you know what?

I used to. I started working at a very young age to help out but also because I thought it was fun, and as it turned out, cashiering was one of those jobs.

And that reminded me of something important about work. At least it's important to me. There is much of the Puritan work ethic in what some of us (me included) do and say in real life and online about money and paying down debt and reaching goals that I think it's really not easy for the average person to see that we enjoyed the work we do, took satisfaction in a job well done or had pure joy of learning. It somehow is perceived as the seemingly righteous tone of trying to reach the goal.

I never thought that most of us were self-righteous, mind, but I do understand the feeling of singlemindedness or focus which I personally take a lot of joy in. Conversely, I understand that feeling stuck produces a serious sense of frustration, and when you can't find the joy in the work, well, feeling stuck and then watching people succeed through perseverance and the idea that working for the sake of the goal is not a horrible idea probably evokes something akin to an allergic reaction. (Solution: stop watching)

I remember being that kid who always thought there was something a bit more to do. I actually wasn't the smartest kid in the class, ever. Just the boredest. Which meant I learned a lot, but not because I was gifted. Just because I was curious enough to want to learn, bored enough with the usual stuff to learn it and just bright enough to eventually grasp it. Not even all the time, though, I was pretty bad in a couple subject areas and just had to keep hacking away at it to keep my grades up because average grades weren't acceptable. But the work itself was satisfying. I liked winning over the material, I liked reading any book I could get my hands on, I liked getting my homework done first.

My self assigned homework incentives were based on reading: two chapters for every homework assignment completed. Bonus: I could finish the whole book if I completed all homework by a certain time. I gamified before gamification was cool.

A shame I didn't figure out this could work on other people. See? I wasn't really a smart kid. But I learned to enjoy certain kinds of work, I learned I didn't like other kinds of work but I could do it and it wouldn't kill me and I learned that you have to work no matter what to make a living. So I worked, and I made a living, and at the end of the day?

I had earned a paycheck by the sweat of my own brow and tired as I was, deep down, I had pride and satisfaction in doing a job well. That meant something to me. I did it myself, I made the best decisions I could, I learned something if it was good day and if I didn't, tomorrow was another day.

And that's just something, isn't it?

Maybe this is just the whole Kid of an Immigrant thing - be glad you can get a job, any job, and be glad you can get paid a wage kind of thing. Maybe it is, but I sort of doubt it.

Bootstrapping lore goes back a long ways, Joyce described bootstrappers as those (perhaps a bit more grandiosely than necessary for our purposes): “who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps. Sheer force of natural genius, that. With brains, sir.”

The West wasn't populated by weenies, either, especially not weenies who didn't appreciate the opportunities they were afforded when they tilled the land or ventured further into the wild unknown.

People the world over are making their lives by sheer force of will, determination, genius, curiosity, need, desire, joy, delight, creativity, or innovation. Whatever it is that makes them tick, they're driven to do something about it, and I think it's gorgeous. People would do well to know why we did it all in the first place and get back to that, or find our way to that place, whatever it is.

I'm lucky that a big part of my (happy) place is general and a little bit is found everywhere: I like getting things done. And I like doing things better, more organized and smarter, every time, every day.

::What's your place?

I'll take Bootstrapping for $400 please, Alex

2012-01-31T21:46:00.000-08:00

There's a blogger who frequents another very popular PF blogger's site and comments in a way that reminds me of another person who used to squat on generally popular blogs: All Financial Matters, Single Ma's blog, I can't remember where else, but definitely at least those two, named Minimum Wage. Does anyone remember MW? I can't recall if MW was male or female but MW was a down and outer, and ze was determined to crap on everyone and everywhere. It did not matter what the conversation was, ze had something negative to say:

"I wish I had that kind of money."
"I wish someone would give me that kind of job/salary/bonus/promotion/praise. I've been working for minimum wage for the past XYZ years....."
"I wish I could have that kind of vacation. I haven't had a day off since ....."
"I wish I could have that kind of car. I can't even drive a working car because ...."
"I wish that was my life. Must be nice."
"I wish I could have retirement savings - boy I wish I could even think about retiring someday, I will never get to retire because all I make is less than [wait for it] minimum wage and I will never get out of this rut and life."

Sunny, hm? And the second anyone made the slightest move toward asking after what MW did or made in the hopes of offering any sort of suggestions that MW might use to lessen the plight, WELL. You might well have spit in MW's face.

Eventually MW faded off the scene in some way, but today I discovered that one of our fellow PF bloggers has a rather pestilent commenter who is persistent in crapping all over his blog and while I'd noted the name once or twice before, I didn't realize ze had a blog of zir own. Curious whether there was something more behind this person, I tarried for a moment and found that actually, this person was only a couple years younger than me and my.. my oh my oh my oh my. This was rather a prime example of the sort of personality that the older generations tut tut at and say: we're screwed. As a dear friend said: FAIL.

So very much of the blogger's posts were just for lack of a less kind word: whining. The blog seethed with entitlement.

For example: A very small debt had blossomed some multiples beyond the original principal because ze hadn't paid and eventually ended up going to court and settled against zir. Ze has decided that there's no gain to be had in paying it. So ze refuses.

Ze also refuses to work a full work week because ze "hates zir job". Ze won't find a better job ("can't"), so instead presumably mopes about but defines the remaining time in the week as time for doing stuff like chores or exercise or blogging. Anything but working or going to school. Those latter two are definitely not on the list. And so ze declares zir job and loathesome bloggers who are successful in life and making any better salaries in any way, those despicable people who have found a way and means, anathema. They and the people who patronize zir job are brats. Ze cannot be one, of course, because ze has no means, the lack thereof clearly demonstrated by the poorness of which ze is plagued.

At this point, I lost my mind a little. I very nearly left a comment. Really? Ze is not a brat? REALLY?? Ze works hours that wouldn't qualify as half a job's time, can't be bothered to plaster a fake smile on zir face, and openly scorns doing that much and the rest of the world that shuts up and puts up?? And has the nerve to hide behind the lesbian card? The people of color card? The woman card?

Throw 'em on the table. Throw them all on the table. Anything else you got? Oh, "lives with your parent" was the concession. Well that's neither here nor there in the game of brattiness.

Well, here's a little PSA. Brats come in all genders, drive all kinds of vehicles, are present in every economic band. It's all in the attitude toward others and willingness to put everyone else down as "Other" and say that they're just not going to put up with any kind of anything from anyone because they will be treated precisely one kind of way from only THIS sort of people.

Brats certainly are the people that you don't like here but they are, alas, not so far away as all that from the picture you have painted of yourself. And being abusive is only half a step away from inviting and creating an abusive environment.

It's a shame that you heap such vitriol on bootstrappers when that's actually the way that most poor people find their way out of poverty. It may be hard to see from their positions now just because they "have so much" and maybe some of their advice rings hollow just because they have anything more than you.

I'm not going to give any advice. I'm just going to say it's shortsighted, intentionally or not, that you're dismissing and in fact attacking a group of people who by definition were once much like you.

I worked myself out of relative poverty working 80 and 100 hour weeks for umpteen years, and my parents took more than 20 years before me because they were strangers in a foreign land to start over. That was on top of the 15 years they'd already spent working out a living in their native land. But without fail, 365 days a year, year after year, they put a smile on their faces and went to do whatever jobs they had at the time whether it was picking up after someone else's animals or children or land or mopping the floors or building a fence or laboring in the sun or rain.

Did they like it? Of course not. Did they want to do it? Of course not. They did it anyway.

Did I like my ridiculous hours? Heck no. Did I want to work 14 hour days? Of course not. But to make sure that the bills were paid and we didn't carry debt forever, I did it.

And were my clients and shoppers nice to me? [Hysterical Laughter] How many diatribes did I listen to? How many insane people did I encounter? I can't even begin to remember anymore. (I do remember having the same flipping conversation with the same old man every two weeks for five years straight because he could not remember a thing. We smiled every two weeks.) Does it matter now? No. Because it doesn't matter in the end. What mattered was that I always did a good job, kept my eye on the important things, got through the days good or bad, and took care of my family so that my physically sick and mentally ill mother did not have to keep working with and listening to the abuse of the bullying crappy coworkers who always had poor attitudes and felt like they were always having a bad day and could take it out on the poor weakest one in the shop.

Not everything goes your way. In fact, very very little ever does without an immense amount of effort. But there is a bigger picture. Whether you can or will or want or don't see it - that's your call. I'm a bootstrapper whose family was poorer than dirt and we fought long and hard each and every d*mn day to win against the grind and still fight it every day because life is just not that easy.

The real lesson here isn't who can make it in life because they worked harder or who can shout "lazy" louder or who has more money. It's about who has the gumption to try and find the way to be happy because I'll be darned if there's a one of us PF bloggers trying as hard as this one to beat Minimum Wage at zir game of Misery.

Limbo

2012-01-30T11:41:00.000-08:00

It’s been weeks of waiting, though not with bated breath which brings back memories of an awful man who punned “baited breath har har” and thought he was terribly funny when he was only terrible.

Waiting for the next shoe to drop ….

Waiting for decisions to be made ….

Waiting to make my next move….

Waiting….

There was life to live these many weeks, one day after the next, and so much to do in the name of survival but most of the time it all felt very much a hidden game of suspense. I didn’t know what to call it at the time, but I was, the whole time, admonishing myself not to play to any perceived or imagined result during this waiting game. [Great advice in that link, by the way.]

Just a week and some days ago, one of the few people I felt free to speak to in some way about this asked after my progress when I had reached my Zen state and he was astonished that I wasn’t fretting over the length of time I'd spent waiting.

But having progressed to the next stage of waiting, I’m sharing the fact that I’m waiting. For a thing. I can’t say for what publicly until I have a result - that's just my rule, I can only say that I am.

I’m not worried, precisely. I’m not afraid of the results whichever way they go, I’m just waiting to see what develops from here. It’s a strange place, this.

T-Mobile Family Plan & MyTouch 4G review

2012-01-22T17:01:00.000-08:00

This time last year, I started the research to consolidate all our phones (his, mine, my parents') into a consolidated plan in order to streamline the finances and save money. I had always been pleased with T-mobile's customer service in the past and the cost of their plans so I suspected that would be the service we would end up with.

In June the right plans and the free smartphones came up so we committed to a fresh set of phones and plans.

The first phones we picked were PiC's G2s but I absolutely hated mind and swapped it for a MyTouch just in time before the month was up.

It was much lighter and the functions were a little smarter: it had copy and paste, the text messaging function showed time and date, unlike the G2, and some of the apps were more useful.

Using non-Gmail email clients is a pain, though, as this phone doesn't allow you to respond in-line; you can only write completely new emails that include the previous message when you like it or not and the web browser is incredibly clunky. It doesn't accommodate multiple tabs or windows very well at all, it loses the open windows or freezes up.

In general, it still handled fairly nicely at first.

Seven months later, the thing is like a half functioning brick. The phone itself freezes up regularly - the touchscreen becomes non-responsive so I have to plug it into the charger, unplug it, repeat several times, etc.

The battery life is nearly non-existent. Without use, the phone lasts on stand-by no more than 6 hours (if that) - and only 1-2 hours with any use so that it's often completely drained to the dregs before the end of a workday. I can't ever go to work without a charger. Same for overnights: it can't last overnight even after being fully charged without discharging itself entirely.

The visual voicemail function is pretty much a joke - it only works part of the time, it may or may not actually convert messages to the visual function but it also duplicates voicemails to the dial-in version and the notifications for the dial-in portion will go off constantly. And I don't know about you but I've gotten to the point where I am completely over receiving and checking voicemails the traditional way - I hate hate hate dialing in and listening to the messages and having to use the menu to save/delete/skip/etc.

We had a relatively decent plan but it rather got my goat that I couldn't cancel my mom's line after she passed. Evidently, it just doesn't matter who the phone line was intended for - because I was taking responsibility for the plan with all the lines, the death of the user of a line counts for nothing so far as the phone company is concerned. I suppose I should have known that would be the case, it's just another thing that's draining a resource that could be better used some other way. I'm considering taking the issue up with them again through corporate but haven't had time.

It's all a bit disappointing really. We haven't saved much money (if any) since switching to T-Mobile and it's been one annoyance after another with the less than smooth transition, the poor quality phones and the rapidly deteriorating performance. The decision was made knowing that the switch was going to be a bit inconvenient but I figured it'd just be a month or two of transition. This seems like it's going to be a rough year and a half to ride out the rest of the contract.

This time, the "smart" financial decision feels pretty dumb.

Estate planning done right

2012-01-17T21:53:00.000-08:00

This reader story on Get Rich Slowly is the most impressive set up of an estate for an executor I have ever seen.

Her father familiarized her with all of his key financial people, negotiated legal and funeral fees, made all the funeral arrangements that he could prepay himself, keeping all the necessary copies of records for her, and settled his money on the children in such a way that accounted for the extra work that she'd be doing as the executor.

He outlined and folder-tabbed the process of settling all the major and most of the minor aspects of the impact of his death on their lives long before he passed. If that's not love, I don't know what is.

~~~

For my side of the family, I had nothing but the funeral to settle and pay for when Mom passed, because I had long taken financial responsibility for just about everything else. The funeral arrangements still cost a fair amount of money, not to mention the travel and other costs.

Dad is now free to earn a bit of a living for himself, and is doing so, but there is no expectation on my part that his efforts will yield more than enough to pay for his basic needs, and just some of them at that.

I'm the first in my family to worry about any kind of estate planning and while I have the framework mentally shaped, it is nowhere near the level of organization that I know a true, developed estate will one day require. And for the moment, that's ok. My own finances weren't there yet a few years ago when I started the process, and neither are ours right now. I will be taking the post shared by Jody as a blueprint.

For PiC's side of the family, we have no clue what the estate plan looks like. As they actually have some sort of family money, that scares me at least a little bit. I have no interest in the money or the estate itself. Marrying into money of any kind was the last thing this Make-it-Entirely-on-Your-Own girl wanted, but I do have concerns as a principle.

Handling any estate is a fair job and handling one with any real value well requires time and diligence that I just don't see at anyone's disposal. And by George, I can only imagine the mess of sorting an unfamiliar estate when you haven't got any of the groundwork laid. Because of this, I've long encouraged PiC to have a conversation with his parent and siblings. They should have a clue about where to begin, end, and how the middle bits join up.

~~~

One good friend's elderly mother, now in her mid 90s, is comfortably well off but frets over saving her pennies. There's no good reason to, my friend scolds, her children most certainly don't need, want or expect any money from her so she shouldn't have to worry about anything but keeping her health and enjoying her days.

Another friend is into her 70s and is hale and hearty but is still working. Partly because of a late in her years divorce which left her financially stranded, partly because it keeps her busy. I don't know if she's also trying to leave something to her children.

Friends in our cohort who are just starting out with young families are just saving or new to investing and haven't really begun "disaster" planning yet. To my mind, though, anyone with dependents really has to get that set down on paper. I would never want to assume that my children would automatically go to the surrogate parent or family of my choice without making certain of it and be raised or supported in the way I hoped. There's no guarantee that an estate plan wouldn't going to be needed until the children were well into their adult lives and were ready to assume the relevant duties of executor or help as necessary.

:: Have you got an estate plan in place? Do you feel any need for one or do you expect to spend down your money by the end of your lives?

[Giveaway] Vows with Sanity and Style: A Practical Wedding

2012-01-13T22:46:00.000-08:00

A little over a year ago, I got engaged and promptly shut down the news cycle on my side of the family beyond my parents lest the wedding juggernaut roll over my intended and me and leave just two imprints in the cement. The tradition, it is that strong.

With plenty of angst and worry over defying my cultural tradition, depriving my parents of the last rites of parenthood, I fled to Meg's domain (literally), A Practical Wedding, to discover that other brides, to be, had been, years past, had shared the same need for a ~~simpler?~~ ~~quieter?~~ less "but everyone says" wedding. There I found that so many similar issues were being discussed and debated in a warm and welcoming forum that the wedding thing seemed just a little less daunting. Bridal parties, stage fright, budgets, families, oh families.

Not less so that I didn't end up running off to fauxlope. I'm still me, after all. And to date, that's been the toughest decision to live with. I remember being so happy but the memory of the day is layered with so much sadness now that it's defined as the last time I ever saw my mom. That's always going to be part of that day. And whether she was fully there for that day, well, that's another thing.

Reading A Practical Wedding the website as a survival guide up until I actually got married, and now reading the book as a survival guide until we celebrate the marriage has been nothing short of a lifeline.

I was sure it would be, so I bought five copies. Selfishly, I'm keeping one for myself. The other four? I can bring myself to share some of them with you good people.

Enter using the Rafflecopter submission form below for each type of entry. Javascript is required to see it, I'm sure, but it's dead useful for organization.

Note: Please don't use the Facebook login - I don't use Facebook and won't be able to contact you via FB if you do, but didn't have any way of removing that option.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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~ This promotion is self sponsored.
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Bridal Parties: The shoe is on the other foot

2012-01-08T21:03:00.000-08:00

PiC's part of a old friend's wedding party scheduled for this spring and it's now time for him to don the planning gloves.

There are 6 groomsmen plus a potential guest list of almost 20 names for the bachelor party. All told, we're looking at 25 possible attendees. (I say we because I've done the planning thing many times and PiC ...1? None? So I'm helping. But I don't get to go. Because, he says, I don't know which strippers they want. Neither does he, I say. Har har, we're a riot.)

There's only the stag party for the men unlike for the women with both a bridal shower and a bachelorette party, but PiC's still looking at spending a pretty penny. At their age (mid thirties and up) and with everyone in far-flung locations, whoever is going to travel will be wanting to do a weekend or at least an overnight, not just an afternoon or a day trip. And los hombres, they like doing interesting things so the list of adventures, well .....

The groom's very outdoorsy so we brainstormed:

Driving (on tracks, travel required)
Hiking (mountains preferred to ... anything else?)
Skiing/Snowboarding/Snow-type stuff (out of state travel required for everyone)
Fishing
Biking (Utah?)
Rock Climbing

Happily, Vegas was vetoed early on. While it's logistically easy, drunken debauchery just wasn't the weekend either of us cared to coordinate, and especially not with that many people.

He's starting coordination with the core group of the groomsmen. He wondered where he should set the budget for the activity and I advised him to aim to keep as low as possible because he can't control the additional costs of airfare, hotel, food and drink for all. At least a few of them like to eat and drink really well (read: expensively) which frightens me/the budget.

So once he's got a location, I can start researching travel options. I'll be looking out for a good sale to keep the round trip airfare below $200, and then we have the hotel to deal with. Unless we get a great package deal and sales on everything else, I suspect this will total in the neighborhood of $800-1000. One of the fellas has a connection to one of places they may go, and I'll be whipping out my bargaining voice once they make a decision.

The time commitment isn't as heavy; there won't be multiple weekends of shopping or crafting or whatnot. But at a certain point, being a groomsmen can become just as expensive for men as it is for women. Good-o.

After this, tuxes, speeches, and the wedding itself! (Add: Cost of airfare for two, rental car, and gifts.)

2012: at this moment, looking forward

2012-01-04T20:40:00.000-08:00

It's 2012.

I'm thinking about my mom.

I'm thinking about the fact that I should be getting some news this month, one way or the other, that impacts my career path.

I'm thinking about the fact that we have, no joke, a thousand things to do this year at work, at home, at work, at home.

I'm thinking about how much I wanted to go home today and think about my mom.

I'm thinking about how we're scheduled to launch the pilot of a new platform that I've worked on for a whole year, next flipping week.

I'm thinking about how I haven't blogged comfortably, well, in months, if not years.

I'm thinking about how on earth I'm going to keep my family together.

I'm thinking about how much travel we tentatively have queued up for the year.

I'm thinking about how much I miss my friends, even the ones I haven't gotten to meet yet, or the friends I've only met once or a few times.

I'm thinking about how I feel like eloping was the right thing to do but I missed out on the bonding that could have happened with old, good friends if I had planned a regular wedding.

I'm thinking about how fun a new project could be.

I'm thinking about how sad and in pain a dear friend was this morning and I'm so glad I emailed her, all unknowing.

I'm thinking about all the thank you cards I want to, need to, write.

I'm thinking about how much I really really need to focus (Singlema's post on Focus at Fitness, Finance and Fun reminded me of the old me, so very very much).

I'm thinking.

Vagaries in Increments

2011-12-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

Money has been a weird thing of late. And weird in odd chunks. Mostly me making mistakes. I haven't paid the stupid tax in a while but it burns me up just like days of yore. Even if it doesn't immediately cause me to miss other bills anymore, it still gets my goat because it's going to get in the way of other goals.

* I saved myself 10% on a big order from Ann Taylor by reordering everything at 50% off instead of 40% off. Except carelessly, didn't notice that at 50% off, my order was $25 shy of the free shipping (no code needed) minimum that I usually never miss and cost myself an extra $13. Kicked myself up and down the street for that and couldn't get a reprieve from the company. I'm going to have to return most of those items because only one thing fit well so I'll have saved myself pretty much nothing.

* Bought PiC two pairs of potentially really nice sneakers from Amazon's sister deal site at a steep discount but made the mistake of letting it charge to my credit card instead of using the rest of my gift card balance. Ended up having to return them both as neither fit well and now I have a whole lot of extra Amazon credit. Which I promptly dug into.

* I tried to transfer a large amount of money from one Chase account to another ING account. Carelessly slipped when selecting from the dropdown menu and grabbed the wrong Chase account - the one that never has real money in it. !!! @(#*$(#!!!

* Received a bill from the dentist, which rather annoyed me because if my recent visit was going to incur cost above and beyond, I am accustomed to having the amount estimated at the time of the visit. I planned to drop by the office to pay it by CC. Frankly, I've been a little busy. A lot busy. It's also only been about two weeks. Another bill came in the mail and they've adjusted the price downward by $53. No reason given. Hrm.

* I have GOT to get on the ball with figuring out creative flight financing for our honeymoon. Those prices are giving me heartburn like a ... well. You know.

Is anyone else's dander up?

In search of a common language: poverty and the great silence

2011-12-27T19:02:00.000-08:00

Andrea's post Are We Defined by Our Mistakes? touched some nerves at So Over Debt. Her personal life with being broke and professional experiences helping the impoverished and the reactions to her conclusions illustrates how complex the issues surrounding poverty. And every time it seems defined, there's another rock to label.

There aren't simple, easy, sound-byte answers. There isn't even an easy list of questions. If ever there was an area in which we tended to chaos, this is it.

Yes, our choices make us who we are. But yes, our nature make us who we are. And yes, our surroundings and environment make us who we are. So yes, until our mettle is tested, we won't discover who we are. The snake eats the tail. As much as I hate that image. All of those influences feed into one another, all of them overlap and intertwine and jostle for position.

*****

If ever we were emotional about money, I find that we are that much more reactive about the lack of it. And our neighbor's lack of it. And his neighbor's lack of it. Because no matter what politics you vote, no matter what religions you preach or practice, social inequality and ills touch us all. And it roots deeply, for some more deeply than others, for some more personally than others.

There's what seems to be need to stifle compassion lest it be construed as weakness(?) in many reactions particularly for those who haven't experienced it; someone else's poverty is to be mocked lest it taint, spread or corrupt. Judge lest ye be included, I suppose. It is a fact that in the greater picture, the existence of poorness affects us all. It could be you, there, one whisper says. It'd better not be, roars another voice, I work hard, I don't deserve that! It's another version of "there but for the grace of God go I." It's another version of "Get away from me." And so on.

And it could be your sister, your brother, your parents, your son, your daughter, your grandparents. Your friends, your cousins, your aunts or uncles. It could be anyone you know and love. And for every single one of those people who might be poor, we can search to find reasons why. Why this one succeeded and why that one did not, and eventually you may find patterns. There are, in fact, statistics and patterns - I've seen them, anecdotally, but I can't for the life of me see how to put them together and draw a good analysis from which we can do better.

There's also resentment, resentment that we work hard and have to keep doing so while others who are less well off are being helped along. Therein lies judgment. Therein lies the willingness to lay blame at others' doors whether or not it makes sense. I've been guilty of this a time or two with my brother. I sincerely doubt that his newly bloomed mental issues were always the cause of his behaviors in the past and it's still hard to move past that to a place where I can unreservedly do what I need to do. But that's hardly productive and doesn't get at the real issue. He needs help and with boundaries, I am capable of rendering basic assistance. It's always easier said than done. But that's the bottom line.

If there's a complicated question to be asked - why him? Why not me? He was born with a myriad of talent, I, very very little. And raised in the same household with the same parents with the same educational benefits, except his was actually a little better. He had every bit as much privilege as I and yet here we are.

*****

But the story, my friends, the story isn't over until it's over. Deep in the fabric of this country, in its soul, is the foundational Horatio Alger archetype that we can all bootstrap our way from rags to riches will-he, nill-he, the American Dream, the dream that we can all one day become successful - whatever that means.

That too, drives much of the emotion and expectation, by the way. Why can't you lift yourself up from the ashes? Well, sometimes, coming from someone who barely believes this in her own life but knows it really is true: sometimes you can't. And you certainly can't do it alone.

I do wholeheartedly know this: It's sheer folly and hubris to believe we exist in a vacuum and can succeed and achieve wholly on our own. There is an enormous amount of effort and blood, sweat and tears that has to come from you when clawing your way up. But alone? Unlikely to the extreme.

Before there were helping hands, there were free internet forums and smart people setting up systems to make an extra dollar and sharing resources. Before there were scholarships, there were libraries with free books to borrow. Before there were blogger-friends, there were real friends who stood staunch in the breaches and supported me even when there was no personal gain or experience of what I was going through. Before I graduated college, there was at least a thousand hours of overtime. I had to do just about everything with my own hands, my own brain and my own breath and I had to sacrifice a lot to get there. But I had the support of a few good friends whether or no it made sense to them and I had one heck of a lot of resources provided by other people. There's no way I'd ever say I did it all by myself.

*****

People come here, my people came here, to live, to thrive, to make lives worth living. Not to fall to the depradations of political strife, corrupt government, grubbing out a living from the riverside or out in the jungle. Instead they faced a new world and its urban challenges of prejudice, language barriers, drugs, a corporate world rife with sheathed-claw politics, business conducted fairly or unfairly as the tempers befit the owners.

Should they be sketched, though, I suspect that the patterns of poverty would fall out similarly even accounting for personal choice and individual deviations. There are enough patterns over the generations that even my untrained eye can note them.

*****

Excerpts from what John Scalzi said:
Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.
Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.
Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.
Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

I could keep going down that list, nodding, but the even more compelling parts are the comments. This set, John's response to a (particularly, I thought, smug and righteous) comment, and the bolded bit is my emphasis, that was in no way reflective of the tone of the thread sums up much of why I'm going on about this:

Kathy Shaidle writes:
“Instead of posting a semi-romanticized, heart-wrenching litany of the things poor people have to put up with when they’re too lazy and/or dumb to get their acts together like we did, why not write another post telling poor people how you went from poor to not-poor.”

Ms. Shaidle, as you may or may not know, I live in a small Ohio town, most of whose inhabitants can be described as the rural poor: They work on farms and they work as blue collar workers. Many of them are poor, because as I’m sure you know farming and rural blue collar work doesn’t pay particularly well.
Very few of these rural poor are lazy, Ms. Shaidle. In fact, they work as hard or harder than anyone I know. And while many of them are uneducated, uneducated is not the same as stupid. In all, these are good, honest, hard-working people. Perhaps you are comfortable classifying them, and other hard-working poor, as “too lazy and/or dumb to get their acts together.” I am not.
Conversely, I’ve worked in high-tech and publishing for much of my life, and as a consequence I’ve known lots of middle and upper class folk. Some of them are quite lazy and/or stupid — so many, in fact, that I am quite comfortable making the observation that dumb and lazy can’t possibly be the deciding factors in who is poor and who is not in this country, because if they were, I wouldn’t be stuck in a three-hour meeting with this idiotic schmuck who is about to dump all his work on me so he can get out to the golf course.
I think it’s a problem that people assume that all the poor are either dumb or lazy, because it’s false, and because it allows the not-poor to go, oh well, they had their chance, and they didn’t do anything with it. As I mentioned before earlier in the thread, lots of poor people are doing everything right to improve their situation, but they don’t have any wiggle room when things go wrong.
The fact that people seem so willing to write off the poor as dumb and lazy is of course why I wrote in the original essay:
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.
“Much more helpful than all the guilty white liberal, pseudo-Russell Banks stuff, what?”
I don’t feel in the slightest bit guilty, and I’ve never read Russel Banks. Also, Ms. Shaidle, I write what I choose. Maybe at some point I will write a “how I did it” piece. However, at this particular moment in time, for various reasons, I think it’s helpful to note to the comfortable what the experience of being poor is, because oddly enough, sometimes it seems like they don’t understand it well, even some of them who have come up from it.

*****

I've been there. I'm still there, in my head. My parents were there. For periods in their lives, separately and together, they experienced a poorness the likes of which most, average, middle and upper-class Americans simply do not know. But the fact they had experienced a poorness even more staggeringly numbing, or at least my mom did, the period in the later years was easy by comparison. Physically, anyway. That's the one thing you can really count on with poverty. Once the grit works under your skin, some bits of it will always stay.

I know people judge. I know they assume. I hear it all the time. And there comes a time hearing shallow judgements, suggestions and assumptions leads to cutting off conversation about it completely which isn't productive, but it is protective. Appearances to the contrary, I'm no naive child who doesn't understand finances, the market economy or the basic idea that you get a job and hold it to make money to support a household. I'm experienced enough to know that in the game of life, whether there is margin for error or not, errors will happen and having zero margin (we call it cash flow, an emergency fund, or cash cushion) is just one part of the inexorable slide into debt and poverty. So to all the people who said, "Why doesn't your dad just get a job as ..." while he was taking care of Mom ....That was not the problem. It was one of many problems. But it was a solution in the morass of problems I was dealing with.

In this newly married life, I'm having to relearn how to open these conversational paths, slowly and painfully, pointing out the complexity of the issues to PiC because he's never lived this life and frankly, I've guarded that side of my life from those in my life who had never experienced deprivation in their lives. And while explaining the situation that developed with my brother, I also had to explain county benefits and welfare, shadowed with the embarrassment of "this is life when you're poor." Bad enough poor, bad enough mental issues, we had to go and combine them.

Those nerves of mine had been exposed this holiday weekend as I visited home and caught the tail end of my brother storming at some dentist's office over their treatment and I don't know what. He muttered, stomped and threatened to call the corporate office.

What corporate office? You're poor. You have no money, no insurance, so you're using a county facility where the dental care has been notoriously poor, negligent even, and that's the normal state of affairs there. Do you think they care? Because I could tell you they really don't.

But there's no telling him. He knows what he knows and when he's waving his Sword of Righteousness there's no telling him anything. Then he comes to me. Do I know what dentist he can go to? Do I know the number he can call? Because he was given a "fake" number to their "corporate office." Because clearly I still live around here and can fix everything after he's gone up a tree again, as usual.

I was silent. He maundered off after a minute.

See that? See the blaming? It's still incredibly hard for me to let go of the rage he elicits by continuing in remarkably familiar behavioral patterns even with the revelatory knowledge that he's not in his right mind, probably.

But it's also incredibly hard for me to choose to suit up and get back into the cycle of poverty that he lives in because there's so little I can do to break it. It's going to be the county dentist unless I come up with cash, and a lot of it, to pay for his dental work. And then will he take care of his teeth? I don't know. And will that prevent any accidents or just regular degeneration that happens even when you do take care of them? No. And will I then come up with more cash when he next needs it? How long can I keep that up? And what other medical issues can I support?

Knowing I'm going to fight an endless fight is draining before it even begins, and I'm not one to back down from any fight. I suspect that may be part of our society's problem in learning how to deal with it. Because there's no simple answer, because there's no secret plan to fight poverty, because we can't list ten action items and know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it's debilitating and it's distracting.

*****
I had a conversation with someone who's been a second mother to me. He'd gone to their house and had a meltdown. At first I wanted to be furious that he exposed us that way but then I just breathed deeply. There's absolutely nothing I can do about it. And I'm going to have to accept that this is the state of affairs. So we had a conversation. She's convinced that he's fried his brain on drugs. She'd had some professional experience in the area so I couldn't say she was wrong; I haven't been there, I literally couldn't say what happened. She's the staunchest conservative thinker I know, but even she agrees I should try to get him into therapy when I am able to deal with it.

That takes us back to the boundaries and the limits. He is my brother but I, too, have to do as much as I can and no more than is sensible for our lives. And because he's poor, because we're not rich or well off, because he's legally an adult and because I can not push my new family to the brink to provide for him, I don't think there's going to be very much I can do. At least, not to my satisfaction or socially acceptable conclusion, anyway. By which I mean, somehow get him to be in therapy, on whatever medication he may require if any, and working to support himself, out of the house, on his own. He is going to have to be some combination of those things, but I can't hold my breath that he's going to become a fine upstanding citizen any time soon.

Having to discuss this openly, in real life, made me realize - there really has to be a way to have these conversations with less shame and less blaming. There has to be a way we can productively find big or small solutions with some heft behind them. Certainly this situation as an example is complicated with the mental illness muddying the waters, but when do they ever run clear? Poverty encompasses this and many other encumbrances that could be managed tolerably in some circumstances, so while I haven't got the answers, I do think it makes sense to embrace the complexity in the conversation.

This post was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance: Australia Edition.

Mid-month Progress: Pre-Christmas panic, family stuff, coping mechanisms

2011-12-19T10:31:00.000-08:00

I'm still working on this deceptively short but ridiculously time-consuming list of things to do to save money for the household. And I've added several items. Lists make life seem more manageable. Until you have lists of lists, at which point the system starts to break down.

1. Benefits seemed easy but it's spawned more paperwork for life insurance purposes. I say thee, tomorrow. I shall complete the last bits tomorrow. Or at least make the next sets of phone calls to finish the last bits tomorrow.

2. Auto and property insurance research was utterly demoralizing. ie: took hours and was still nigh-on impossible to nail down a good comparison.

3. The mortgage stuff we're getting a start on but we're not at the point of dealing with the actual refi.

4. I've been madly dashing around at work trying to get everything to the right point for the upcoming new year and battling madly but quietly for my next step.

So ....

Check! I have finally wrapped five gifts purchased earlier in the year. But we're still down at least five gifts. Yeeks!
Check! PiC blew our gift budget on ME. It wasn't the classic (stupid) car commercial but it was a big gift I wasn't expecting.
_____ And has been mum on the subject of his family's gifts so they really may be getting socks. [see, blew our budget]
_____ We're traveling a little for the holidays and then hosting a full house for a few days so we're double whammy on the stress of preparations.
_____ I still haven't planned anything for our anniversary. He wanted to do something special for our 1-year engagement anniversary.

_____ And I'm working on Holiday Gifts for the Office, as blogged over on the Carnival site.

Check! Mission: Find Non-denominational Seasonal Cards was accomplished, though! I triumphed in the face of great mobs and traffic. *shudder* I had forgotten the state of any mall and parking lot in the end of December, since all the shopping's been online lately.

That's not terrible, eh? How's everyone else doing out there?

Barnes taking over Borders' customer lists: Will you opt out?

2011-12-08T19:23:00.000-08:00

(This post is going up a little late.)

This is a first.

I received an email, as you might have if you were part of the Borders Rewards program, from Barnes and Noble informing me of the acquisition of Borders property in the liquidation which included "Borders brand trademarks and their customer list."

I have no idea what they intend to do with the trademarks but they wanted that customer list for obvious reasons.

Our intent in buying the Borders customer list is simply to try and earn your business. The majority of our stores are within close proximity to former Borders store locations, and for those that aren't, we offer our award- winning NOOK™ digital reading devices that provide a bookstore in your pocket. We are readers like you, and hope that through our stores, NOOK devices, and our bn.com online bookstore we can win your trust and provide you with a place to read and shop.

I don't know about you but my first skim/misreading of that paragraph completely had me thinking they were offering Nooks as bribes for us to not opt out. Wishful thinking.

How do you feel about being passed over, with your full knowledge, as a customer from one store to another? Do you expect Barnes to earn your business all over again or are you already a customer? Would you expect them to start from ground zero if not?

Married Life: Mortgage Prepayment for Refinancing

2011-12-05T21:28:00.000-08:00

With just about all savings interest rates in the tank, PiC and I have agreed that without waiting for me to further flesh out our annual budget for 2012, his next expired CD will go into a large prepayment toward the mortgage.

It isn't the amount we need to get us at the right loan to value ratio for a refinance but it will be a substantial step in the right direction, and there's no reason not to start this process. This is our primary residence, and the interest rate is nearly 5% while savings rates are barely hovering around 1%.

Even if we wanted to move out and turn this place into a rental, the current total mortgage and HOA costs are too high in comparison to market rental rates for the same sort of housing for us to break even in this economic environment. Between bringing down the total loan cost a significant amount and locking in a much lower interest rate, I think we could ultimately save approximately 40% of the current mortgage. That's no small beans in cash flow and would make it easier for us to take any kind of rental situation risk.

I plan to sock that saved cash away again because I'm pathological like that. ;)

Actually, there's a good reason - we would just have put something like $65,000 cash into the process. That's my current estimate of the cash cost. We should be able to swing it if we put together our savings, prioritized carefully and set aside a new emergency fund. The huge cash defusion will still give me indigestion, committing that much cash when I'm still worrying about my next job-related moves is worrisome, but I do think it makes sense overall.

As for allocations: while that increased cash flow needs to replenish our savings because it will have been much decreased and that makes me nervy, we still have to set aside money for mid-sized savings goals for 2013 as well. That's yet another reason it would make sense to let loose the cash bomb, we'd only be limited to looking for ways to increase income to fund any expenses for the upcoming year that can't be carved out of this year's budget. I'm a fan of planning a year in advance to break down the savings necessary for really big bills like property taxes, travel, and that sort of thing.

I feel like I'd better hurry up and make all the changes we need to, I'm running out of steam already!

:: Is this normal to feel so responsible for stuff this early on? Was the first of married life this hectic for anyone else?

Married Life: Benefits

2011-12-02T19:50:00.000-08:00

With everything going on, it took two and a half weeks into married life to even look at the benefits. Ree-diculous. I'm normally obsessive about benefits but even I am now thinking 30 days post wedding is simply not enough time to deal with those changes. Still, we managed to wade through the majority of the issues.

I've been added to his full benefits package - Medical, Dental, Vision - and am retaining my own FSA. I was rather on the fence about that one - does it make more financial sense in terms of tax breaks for me to have the tax benefit, him, or does it come out in the wash since we should probably file together? I hadn't a minute to do any tax estimates for the purpose of estimating how we should file so I just had to let that go for now.

A few things are still left to be done.

Because my additions to his benefits were made during his open enrollment period, his company won't activate my benefits until the new year. Lovely.

Meanwhile, it turns out that I cannot, because of the way my benefits are structured, retain just my Dental and Vision with him as a dependent so that we have secondary coverary while dropping the Medical that I'm paying for. So I will have to drop all my benefits.

{Break for a moment of spazzing: Even though I'll still be fully covered, that makes me feel naked. I haven't not had my own full coverage since I was 17. Seriously. This is insecurity "I'm a dependent-what??" territory.}

I will now focus on the fact that I am exceedingly grateful to have the choice between two decent insurance plans that we can afford, even though his is more expensive, because there are too many people who can't afford insurance at all including my own family. {That's why the reaction, actually - I've always worked past the point of breaking to make sure I'd have coverage. Now we're dependent solely on his job to provide. Dependent. *breathe*}

You will note that while I may fully intend to make rational decisions, I still have emotions about my money.

Estimated cost: Increases in monthly premiums of approximately 20% overall, but coverage will be more extensive for routine procedures.

One example: I'm expecting a slew of dental work to the tune of $1000+, and after the deductible, my cost was going estimated to be $388 on my own plan with a $100 deductible and an 80% basics coverage.

PiC's has a lower deductible ($50) and covers 90% of basic treatment. While we're paying $8 more/month for that premium dental plan, I'm clearly going to be saving at least that $100 difference right off the bat with this single treatment between the deductible and the extra 10% coverage.

Next up: When my coverage starts with PiC, I have to cancel my own benefits using the Life Status Change for Reason of "Insurance Coverage Changes". I didn't even remember that was one of the options under qualifying life event/doesn't have to wait for open enrollment to change your plan! Learn something new.

We also increased our life insurance to more adequate amounts based on our new financial obligations and added each other as beneficiaries. That was weird. But necessary. I wouldn't be able to carry this mortgage plus all the other finances without extra help and both PiC and my dad would need some financial assistance if I were bumped off.

That means filling out more paperwork this weekend and once again at the start of the year. After that, we should be in good shape until the next open enrollment period! *whew*

So much for simple, huh?

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T21:01:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who is celebrating, everyone who would be celebrating, and those who would have liked to or have opted to celebrate in their own way.

We're having a very quiet Thanksgiving this year - no long distance travel, no incredibly ambitious menu with seven gourmet-style items in a ten hour cooking marathon, no splitting our time across multiple families. I'm incredibly grateful for that. I'm grateful that we're just doing our own little silly dinner with whatever we want, with very little pressure except for my own expectations of really really wanting yummy turkey, stuffing and gravy.

In the grander scheme of things, I'm ever so grateful for PiC's love and support. I'm grateful for this time and space in our lives in which, despite and because of all the challenges, we're still able to cope and overcome. I'm glad that, despite my minor reservations, we dove into the faux-lopement last month together. It'll be a month in four days and we have had a hell of a married life so far. And yet, it's been somehow completely non-turbulent in terms of our relationship. We do manage this kind of chaos well enough, as weird as it is to say. None of it's actually been easy, it's just that we've done this before.

I'm hugely grateful for all of the virtual support writ live from the Twitter and blogging community during these weeks and months. It's been a pocket haven of sanity and levity.

There's more, but I managed to cook a full Thanksgiving meal largely by myself and it was actually pretty good and I've eaten enough for my belly to want an extra compartment so I'm going to carry on in another post. But that I was physically able to do that? That my hands, arms, legs, and brain held out? That it actually feels like I'm sleeping when I sleep a full night, finally? That's pretty good too.

Signing off for the night.

My Brother's Keeper

2011-11-22T19:44:00.000-08:00

I keep thinking about Mom. But it's taking days and weeks to form words, words into a sentence, then into coherence. I'm working. Eating. Sleeping. Taking care of business. But at odd moments of the day, I keep thinking about Mom. But for now, that's not where my words want to flow. Because they're still swirling in my heart and my gut. And that makes this other thing that I couldn't write before emerge from the darkness.

It was so much easier when I could just write him off as an egomaniacal selfish jerk. Not easy, mind. Just easier.

I've long missed having a big brother, I missed having a full family (a real family), I missed having someone who remembered all the family secrets, to share the jokes, mimicry and stories. Just like I've missed having a mom. But this was easier. Easier because it was his choice. It was his loss. It was his fault. I had tried, you see. I had done the best I could with kind words, wheedling words, empathetic words, angry words, harsher actions, drawn lines in the sand, feet planted and stone in my heart.

I had failed, which wasn't something I could really forgive myself for, but perhaps someday I could absolve myself of the responsibility of his life having gone the way of so many other wasted lives. Trying to accept the reality, trying to swallow my crackling bitter pride, I rehearsed the explanation to my future children, that they once had an uncle, I once had a brother, we were once great enemies and great pals, fanciful adventurers and creative plotters, but alas. It was complicated. The explanation tilted and twirled, the questions bobbed to the surface, but why....? But how....? When did it go wrong? Couldn't you...?

But still. I could walk away into that future where I had no good explanation. I had to - if I wanted a future. For my health, my sanity. I had my parents to think of. My future family to tend to. It rent my heart but I had to leave a piece of my family and move forward.

And so my resolution was made to move my parents into a safer place as soon as I possibly could, leaving him to fend for himself.

***

Labor Day weekend, I visited my parents and my soul was pummeled with all the fury of great titans, passion worthy of Ali v Frazier. My brother, the jerk, my brother, the eldest son, my brother.

He was speaking gibberish, not just his usual castle in the sky and whistling in the wind, but true, delusional gibberish. And I knew that my secret fears that I'd never uttered aloud but once had begun to come true. He'd begun to spiral into some new world of his invention, one where he could teach animals speech and they'd speak back, and so he'd converse with them, and the furniture, and the buildings, at length.

And his dog watched him, with sad, sunken eyes. He knew. Loyal with every sinew, bone, and breath. But still even he knew, there was something terribly wrong. And he looked at me with those sad eyes.

***

It's been a terrible, horrible year for my Dad. But he's borne it well, as well as he can. He carries the guilt of my mother's illness and now, in part, her passing; the guilt of my brother's failed life and the revelation of his instability and probable illness; my struggles of the past years and the extra burdens created by the concessions I made due to my brother and their inability to love him any less. All these, he carries as a shroud and as a shield.

He managed to start a small business several months ago, while juggling the care of my mother, driven by the need to alleviate my financial burden any small degree, and while he's ready to take on the care and keeping of my brother as his next responsibility, I can't allow that.

It's not sensible, he doesn't have the tools to deal with this, his role as a father isn't the right or effective one to rein in or treat the madness. But neither do I have the tools. We need professional help and we need to learn from the past mistakes and not let him sink the rest of the family under the weight of this.

Most importantly, most selfishly, I need my Dad to stay well; he's the last of my family. In a mass of hundreds of relatives - cousins and aunts and uncles - I only have one parent left. He has to stay healthy and because of that, I have to become, once again, my brother's keeper.

***

It's certain as the full moon will wane that until he has some evaluation and/or treatment, my brother will not change for the better. So the first course of action will be to find out what options are for medical treatment out there that don't involve beggaring ourselves. I'm not putting him above my new family, or my Dad, in this situation.

Next, he needs to be in a safe place to live NOT with Dad, and certainly not with us, but again, it cannot be by sacrificing anyone else.

Because he's sick, I will undertake the search for what options there are but this won't be a quick process. He's an adult, so that complicates things. And money isn't freely flowing around here, and he doesn't get any special treatment. Unlike Mom, he didn't earn the Anything Goes package even if I were made of money. He's my brother but he was abominable when he had a choice. He's my brother so I will look out for him if I can but there are absolutely limits.

N-October Snapshot

2011-11-20T14:51:00.000-08:00

I'm back. Thank you for all the thoughts and condolences, everyone.

It's a -something- getting my head and feet back where they need to be so, as usual, I turn to working with finances for comfort.

We're nearly through November, so at this point, I don't know what to call this.

Retirement Accounts
Just as I predicted, my new retirement account through my "new" job (I guess I should call it the Now Job) is fairly mediocre to poor.

Overall Rate of return on the new 403(b): -4.94%
Balance over 1 year timeline: 747.01 to 6661.87

All the increase is in contributions with losses, not gains.

Vanguard rallied this month, though.

Brokerage account
This account sees steady (tiny) increases every quarter generally. $700 of that 1,915.05 is just cash I'm holding for a future purchase that I may or may not make. Still, neither of my stocks have lost money over the time that I've held them (though it only matters at the time I sell) and one pays dividends so it's throwing off income in the meantime. A whole $4 every quarter!

Cash
There was a modest false bump in the cash calculations because I locked myself out of my Ally Bank account at the end of September and never bothered to get back in again. That's where my CDs are and so I haven't been getting accurate data on the interest earnings for the CDs.

It turns out that my cash holdings passed the $50K mark this month after recouping the cost of the funeral from funeral gift monies and adding the remainder (a very modest amount) as a separate category to take care of remaining costs as they come.

Spending has been OUT OF CONTROL though. In the week we were down south, we spent more on gas, food, and incidentals than we'd normally spend in a month, I think. I haven't had time to comb through everything yet.

New

Family Budget:
I'm creating a combined budget for our money going forward. It's sort of good timing in that we're at the end of 2011 anyway, so I'm taking all our liquid cash and pooling it to create a fresh set of household funds similar to my current set-up.

I've never had this much to work with but there are two of us in our little family and Doggle now, and two extended families to plan ahead for. Now I need to figure out which banks to use.

Mortgage:
We've explored some refi options and I am now pondering on the wisdom of the financial risk we'd be taking in committing to one or another of these options. More research to come!

Benefits:
Now that we're married, we can combine our benefits. Costs will go up on PiC's side, and go down on mine. I don't think we actually come out ahead, though, as I do the math.

Insurance:
It's time to reevaluate the cost of our auto, home and other insurance. We currently carry our insurances separately, of course, so it's time to see about combining them for cost-effectiveness and discounts.

Upcoming Spending:
* We need a new mattress for the bedframe that PiC Craiglisted earlier this month. I really hate mattress shopping. All those options and I can't tell the difference in how one mattress feels from the next, but there's this imperative to pick the right one because you're going to have it for a trillion years. And you know the bargain hunter in me would absolutely have to know we're getting the best deal possible. It's possible I'm a little more gripey than usual about it because I'm tired but ... I'm probably exactly as gripey as I normally would be.

* I need to plan our Christmas shopping - I already have some small gifts for other people earlier this year but there are primary gifts for family that haven't been bought yet.

In sum: Tons to do and I feel like I need to do it all right now. Surprisingly.

Faux-lopement series and blogger on hiatus

2011-11-05T16:33:00.000-07:00

My mom passed away suddenly. I'm shuttering the doors for a little while to deal.

PiC's a rock and Doggle's a spaz and we're going to take care of my dad and vice versa.

Faux-lopement: Day of the Wedding

2011-11-01T22:23:00.000-07:00

Actual Wedding Stuff

Outside the courthouse, it was positively gorgeous. The sun was out, everyone arrived nearly at the same time, I was given two beautiful bouquets because two of my friends knew I wasn't going to even think of flowers. And one was also turnabout for taking care of hers.

I spent some time with people in the parking lot as they gathered but I hid in the bosom of my surrogate family for a while. I wasn't nervous, I just felt ... surrounded for a minute. I needed quiet.

Then my parents arrived. And my blood pressure went up. My dear older friend who is bossy, domineering, mothering though childless, and knows how worried I was about Mom, came over and introduced herself, took Mom's arm and I could breathe again. She's wonderful precisely because she's all those things. She's a take charge personality I've come to love and trust and she helped with Mom the whole time we were waiting in line at the courthouse so that Dad could just be.

We never have that kind of help and it was a huge boon that morning. Mom was doing particularly well that morning, too, which was amazing. She had trouble remembering names, and faces, but she didn't have any real outbursts early in the day. She wasn't overtired or overwrought.

As it turned out, we waited in the wrong line for 20 minutes because it wasn't clear which one to be in, and I felt a bit of a silly arse because I'd looked them over to check! That made us late for our appointment. As the minutes ticked off, my blood pressure started shooting up. PiC was remarkably calm at that point, saying it was fine, we'd just go elsewhere if they didn't take us but that made me feel even worse. The thought of dragging our 20 plus group back of beyond because I'd screwed up the lines?? Augh!!

Luckily they had our judge stick around for this last one and made it happen.

Of course, she was in a tearing hurry. She started off, with her poufy hair, looking over her '70s shaded glasses, "in the middle of someone else's shift, so we have to do this expeditiously." So expeditiously it was done. The ceremony could not have lasted more than three minutes. Blink or breathe too hard and you missed it. She wasn't rude but I think she still upset one of our friends for coming right out with the whole "let's move along" speech. He felt it really wasn't necessary. (I was amused.) It was not the worst thing ever, I was worried a long ceremony would have me in tears and I hate crying in front of people but we didn't realize that at least one of our guests had been downstairs and hadn't come back in time!

PiC was grinning madly throughout.

The judge granted us about 2.5 seconds to take photos in the room and then sent us out to the front of the courthouse for any pictures we wanted. And those took too long - I was starving! I know, sentimental. I do regret not getting a good photo with my surrogate family in the fuss of everyone bossing everyone else for the photos and then getting antsy for lunch, but I'll have a do-over.

We had a lovely lunch with the group, sans my parents, lots of photos were taken. The absolute necessity of following the A Practical Wedding's How to Write a Perfect Toast was underlined. There's a picture that I'm hoping wasn't captured on anyone else's camera that shows my face at a moment that I'll just call "sentimentality" to anyone else. PiC and I had a talk later about this. I'm not letting the memory fester but it also may not happen again at Round Two.

On a related note, I have no doubt thousands of photos were taken, in fact, which frightens me no end. Living in an age where photos are just ... everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Augh!

Traffic to and fro, of course, this having been in LA. But after all was said and done, we got home to visit with family briefly, and then went to feed me again. My lunch salad was sad and I was starving again. Stuffed full of sushi, we made our final guest drop-off and collapsed at our crappy hotel room just before midnight. (I reserved my annoyance for a letter to the Doubletree after we got back.)

We. Were. Married.

You know, it wasn't perfect. It was full of hustle and bustle and "are you serious with boutonnieres too-big, boutonnieres too-heavy, boutonnieres won't-stay? Because non-essential stress, kids. NON ESSENTIAL. Skipped it for a reason. Also, you bring it, you fix it." (I fixed it.)

For all that we crushed this wedding into a time capsule we still caught other people's expectations, other people's imposed "necessities", other people's baggage. We were also lavished with other people's love and joy and silliness and loyalty and steadiness. (And cute little tiny baby feet! So many babies.) We still played our roles of fixer upper, mediator, organizer, event planner, picker uppers. Because that's who we are. That's what we do. And that's "who" our wedding was. It was good. It was better than perfect, it was us. Low-key, casual, almost-normal. And PiC was stupid-happy. I really liked that.

It was good.

***

Next spring, we'll host a food thing of some kind where everyone we care about, including long distance friends who didn't get the chance to make it and were sad not to have been offered the chance, will be given plenty of warning. I don't want to miss the opportunity to see them and spend time with them. But it won't be a pressure cooker of an event. It's just going to be a gathering of loved ones. And I guess we could get around to having some rings by then, if we wanted to. There's also going to be the fancy dress, since it got altered already!

But for a bigger thing? I'm asking a couple of my girls to help out. I'm not dealing with any more stupid flower pinning emergencies. ;)

{Next: a financial analysis, of course!}

Part One: Race to a Wedding: Five days to a Faux-lopement
Part Two: Faux-lopement: Details, Details, Gettin There

Faux-lopement: Details, Details, Gettin There

2011-10-31T19:43:00.000-07:00

Go Time

Before we knew it, Thursday had arrived and it felt like nothing was done! Granted, we didn't have all that much to do since I'd trimmed our list of need to dos down to next to nothing. But the truth was, we were rushed off our feet at work and trying to wrangle arrangements according to a slightly archaic system.

Luckily, work wasn't a problem ... in fact, my boss strongly suggested I get the heck out of there early because he thought I was insane. I suspect my team thought the same since he'd outed me behind my back. Not that I was keeping it a secret, I just didn't have time to tell them!

Rings were stricken from that list - not critical.
New shoes for me, not critical. If I could get a dress altered, great. If not, old dress. If not, slacks and nice shirt. No, wait, incoming text from cousin - "wear a dress or else." Big cousin, I grew up with from toddlerhood. Means it. Old dress it would be.
Manicure, pedicure, veil, hair piece, decorations, fooforrah - definitely not critical.

We needed gas for the car, we needed a place to stay post-wedding (because I do not care how frugal it is to stay at a parent's house in town, I'm not staying there on our wedding night), we needed our travelers to be situated, picked up and dropped off at the right times. Ok, scheduled, sorted and sorted.

I called the tailor trying to explain the situation - he wouldn't let me. "I understand 'emergency', come come, just come in, I can do this!"
"But ... no, I don't think, please, let me explain, it's -- "
"No no, just come in!"

He didn't really understand. Sweet man, but really should have let me explain. After pinning me up and giving me the price quote and explaining the alterations, he offered to rush the job and have it ready at 5 pm Friday.
Er.
How about noon?
Er.
Today? You need it today???
..... *nod nod*
..... I'm going to have to alter the price a little.
......*nod nod*
$10 more.
/head tilt/ -- In my head: really??-- I will see you in at closing, sir!

We went on a panic shop for PiC and found his entire outfit minus a shirt at Macy's in 2 hours. Then his shirt was another 15 minutes at Banana Republic (yay for gift cards!) And back to pick up my dress. Fit. A. Dream. It was an exorbitant amount, but for a three hour rush job, I can accept that.

Despite a semi-early exit from work, the errands took us long enough that we didn't leave until *really* late. The drive was easy, though and we arrived at dark o'clock in the morning. I napped for a few hours before heading out to get a hair trim and pick up a guest arriving at the airport. Or so I planned. I was held hostage at the hair salon while my long-time stylist trimmed and then styled my hair as she felt was more elegant and appropriate to the occasion. Hostage, I tell you! Not only would she not listen to what I asked for, she wouldn't tell me what she planned to do. Point blank refused. "I'll take care of it," she says.

And then she undercharged me massively for it. She didn't put it up or anything but I know for a fact she charges $75 for bridal hair before tip. She only charged $38 for cut and style, and wouldn't let me tip her. Have you ever heard of such a thing??

But, she was right. It looked really much better than my original rush-out-the-door hair plan. We even had time to stop for coffee before our airport errand. Miracle worker, that woman.

Back to the house to get dressed and futz around on the internet. Oh, and book a hotel for that night! Hotel points, FTW!

{to be continued}

Part One: Race to a Wedding: Five days to a Faux-lopement

Race to a Wedding: Five days to a Faux-lopement

2011-10-30T18:31:00.000-07:00

Changing our Tunes

Remember how I said wedding planning was a pain, and I didn't like it? Well, I (and PiC) didn't like it so very much that the unthinkable became thinkable. And then ....

Well, at first, I thought it was a joke.

A couple days after that post on the 11th:
"What about the end of October?"
"What about the end of October?"
"What if we just went to the courthouse?"
/head tilt/ "... to ... do what?"
"You know. Get married."
-- *mentally reading the calendar* you're going to be traveling most of this month. When are we going to talk or do anything about getting married with even just a few people present?-- "Surely you're joking."
No answer from PiC.

Ok, he must have been joking.

October 23rd, he returned from a trip. The subject was reopened the next day. "You weren't kidding? You're not kidding? Right now, you're not kidding me? You're kidding me. Right? What? WHAT?"

He was not kidding me.

Wheels started turning. Panic set in a little bit. It was all a joke before! Now it wasn't! Holy chickaree! But aside from a few moments of {why are we doing this ...??} it felt right. Mom's health has been steadily declining. I haven't been happy with any of the earlier compromises or attempts at planning largely because of my worrying over her health and how she'd be able to handle any kind of event even though she wanted me to have one. I personally didn't want one. Talking to my dad Tuesday night confirmed that she's not having any sort of miraculous turnaround or even stabilizing. There was no sense in holding out for her sake.

PiC being happy to have a much smaller one, even elopement style, was amazing. He was always happy with the idea of small but not as small as I wanted it to be. Also I was stuck between the all or nothing situation and wasn't sure how to find my way out. How do I invite some of the relatives I really want to share this with and not create a family rift? And that alone would be too many people in combination with his family and friends. So I sacrificed all of my family but three. Plus surrogate family - old friends so close I've been adopted into their clan. My heart was appeased.

This compromise of around 20 was manageable - I was pretty sure I wouldn't lose my composure. We were sorely missing some very good friends but the days hurtled past and we couldn't dwell on that. Or anything.

Calls were made. My most amazing long distance people booked their flights (even cross country) the second I confirmed we were trying to do it last Friday - before we even had plans. We rushed to the SF courthouse for a license on Tuesday. He confirmed the courthouse appointment on Wednesday. We picked a restaurant that night and made the reservation on Thursday. We confirmed most of our guests up until Friday morning. I was confirming and adding seats to our table as late as arriving at the restaurant for lunch. This was not a normal wedding by any stretch of the imagination.

{to be continued}

Pets: Putting Doggle in Financial Perspective

2011-10-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

As much work and as costly as Doggle has been in the totting up of his bills over the months, there are some pretty amazing things about this dog that makes me say it's totally worth it. Also, I like to point out that if you really want to think about the costs, you have to think about the FULL picture, and that includes considering what kind of dog we could have gotten since we did get really lucky with the pup we brought home.

Remember, this big man was abandoned for at least a year before we brought him home, and we have no clue what his history was before that. He could have been a shivering wreck inside his head and ready to burst out with all kinds of crazy after we took him home, just hiding it behind a stoic face when we first met him. It's not that dogs are duplicitous, it's just that when they first meet you, all the nuances of their personality aren't going to be evident. That was certainly true of Doggle. It took him about three months to come out from his shell entirely and show that he actually had a personality lurking underneath.

Happily, most of that livelier personality is more pleasant than not. There're also some rather ... limpet-like parts to his personality. It's usually cute but ... sometimes it's not.

How Doggle Costs Money:

Oh Vet Bills (Medication/Supplements): Doggle has been to the vet every other month since he's been with us. We've spent over a thousand dollars on his medical bills so far. *_*

Carpeting: His poor staggering legs don't deal very well with the slippery floors so we've laid down new (to us) rugs. Thank you, Craigslist and Costco for relatively cost effective rugs and padded squishy mats.

Food: He just keeps on eating. And I've turned into a bit of a sucker about buying him a stock of treats. Yeah. I'm that dog mom. I never was before.

Car upgrade: But let's be honest. It wasn't like PiC hadn't been looking for his car upgrade for several years.

How He Doesn't Cost:

Furniture: He doesn't mark on anything at home, thank goodness. He's embarrassed us in places where other dogs have previously marked their territory as that lights up that little area in his brain that says "oh! I should pee here too!" But as our home has been unmarked, so it stays. Whew.

He also doesn't chew, scratch or (mostly) climb. Occasionally he takes a freak into his head that maybe he should try to get on the sofa. Then he gets put in timeout.

Shoes/Bags/Socks/Clothes/Books/Small Items: He also doesn't steal, chew or destroy any of these things.

People Food: He's not allowed to have any. Not that that has diminished his interest in our cooking activities or eating at the table or anywhere else one whit. But he also doesn't beg. He's allowed to hang around and sniff within a certain limit.

Toys: He's still not interested. He's just starting to get the barest inkling of how to socially interact in play with other dogs or people. I'm trying to teach him and expose him to other big dogs because small dogs around here are frankly, brats, who mostly don't want anything to do with him if they're not being snappy, snippy, yappy and their owners just don't socialize or train them out of those nasty behaviors. Bigger or younger dogs really like him, though, and that's really nice.

Energy: 95% of the time, he has amazing indoor manners. Which is to say, he is incredibly quiet and mellow inside. If you're hanging out, he's hanging out. If you're sleeping, he's sleeping. If you're cooking, he's in the way. But he doesn't bark, he doesn't scratch, dig, growl, or generally freak out in any way.

2% of the time he has little freakouts where he goes into corners and huddles or has to be on the sofa which is a no-no. 3% of the time he is really really really happy you just got home or we're going for a walk. That is a really manageable percentage, in my mind.

Extra Baths and Carpet Cleaning: He only gets baths on our schedule which varies between every 3-6 weeks. We can do this because he doesn't roll in the dirt, he doesn't rub himself in gross stuff he finds on his walks, and while he might get himself a little in his poorly-aimed, old man spatter, he lets us wipe him down after every walk and wipe his paws as well. Docile as anything.

At the end of the day ....

I'm so glad we've got him. We have made a lot of adjustments. We factor him into the morning and evening routines to take the time to take him out twice a day, (but that's all we have to do - we have neighbors who walk their yappers FIVE times a day!) We either travel with him by car, one of us stays home with him, or have to make arrangements for him. We mostly do the first two, though. I'm hopelessly attached. ;)

How to Unlock Your Achievements

2011-10-20T20:12:00.000-07:00

Pardon, you might think you're at the wrong blog today. But I've got to go on another career-related rant. My colleague told me today that someone was "upset" at the organization. When I asked why, I was told that the someone had wanted to apply for a promotion but wasn't allowed to because of a lack of a specific key qualification. That someone was upset: I've been here for years, and I've never been given the opportunity to do that!

........ Really? Really??

Ok. Nerve? Torched. Because honest to Jeopardy, darling, that's just it, isn't it? You've been here for years and that's the end of your response? No one took care of you? Did you do anything about it? Or did you sit there like a limp noodle the whole time and then jump at the chance for more money without considering what you needed to do in order to land that peach? [I can answer that. No. Didn't do nuffin'.]

And now you're upset at the organization that wronged you. Honestly.

"I wasn't given an opportunity."

"I didn't get a chance to show you what I could do."

I'll give you a hint: These are not the phrases to use when you want a job or a promotion and you've been told that you're underqualified because of some missing skill or qualification.

In fact, I will heartily tell you that I am sick of hearing them. Don't even think it. Imagine your upcoming job or career opportunities. Imagine what the recruiter, hiring manager or resume screener is going to think when he/she/it looks at your resume and compares it to the list of what they want or need. If you find yourself reverting to those up there as your only answer (aka: excuse) when your hiring manager disabuses you of the notion that you're going to get the job, I want you to Shake Yourself.

Non. Non.

Not only will that not get you the job, it will, in certain eyes, reduce any respect they might have had for you. Like mine.

Tell me, why do you need the opportunities given to you?

Let me tell you what I've discovered that phrase and the utterers have in common: a need for spoonfeeding. It says to me, on your behalf: When you hire me, I'm going to ask you basic questions to which I should know the answers or should be able to find myself. And when you don't have time to feed me, I'm going to do something else without bothering to try to find out the answer myself.

As it turns out, Google is your friend. As it turns out, there are tons of other resources available and when it comes to allocation of resources, do you want to waste our half hour on: "How do I write my review? How does this process work? What should I write?"

Or do you want to spend it talking over which skills you need to set you up for a cool new project and in line for a promotion? Because I will answer the question you ask. But if you want to throw away what I can do for you, then you are throwing away your own opportunity. And frankly, I have too many other people asking for time and attention to mollycoddle anyone who won't do anything but flip their hair and flap their hands until the next question.

I'm inclined to helping people grow and learn but there's only so much pushing I can do. I've learned my lesson - I'm not going to hire any more people who display that lack of savvy and initiative if I can help it.

Sometimes, it's valid

Granted, there are certain things you need the support of others to do, you need the authority to do, or you plain cannot have without someone giving something up.

Very true, you must be given some of those things. However. You can show your initiative by learning about the things you want to do even if you cannot whole-cloth have them. You can take classes, you can shadow people who are doing the job, you can ask them to mentor and teach you, you can volunteer elsewhere to pick up the experience you want even if it's not in the same place or environment.

If it's an internal promotion you have your sights on, you should, without being obnoxious about it, express your interest clearly in the kind of advancement or experience you would like and why. In general, you should always be doing that anyway!

If you're going for a new job and it wasn't your job to do the work in question but you've gone and learned it anyway, you bet your boot nails I will rate you more highly than a person who did have the work and was not distinguished in any way by how they did it.

Think about it: who looks better? The one with fire in the belly, clearly has special interest and has done something about it? Or the one who has been flapping hands around in a puddle looking like doing a job? I'm no idiot - I want the fire-eater, every time.

That's not to say that someone who already does the job always gets trumped by an up and comer, I'm just saying that there are clearly mediocre lifer-type candidates who barely do their job. We know they shouldn't get promoted over someone with real potential because they aren't capable. But -- you can't be that newcomer if you don't realize your own potential. No one can do that but YOU.

Potential is just resting, potential is possibilities. Don't tell me you have potential. Show me what that potential can be. Get out there and show what you're capable of with every possible tool at your disposal. Ask for support and learn new things. Don't just sit there waiting for opportunity to present itself. You're just kicking opportunity in the face.

Show me your will, that is the way.

Ironically, as I write this, I clicked through an email notifying me that Erica.biz has posted on her blog, writing about her journey of the past ten years. I keep an eye on people who have the same drive to succeed that I do, even if my path is nowhere near like hers. And you know what? The essence of her message is very much the same:

This world does not hand you success. It certainly doesn’t hand you a job. I’ve had to fight for everything I’ve had in this life. I’ve taught myself what I need to know to be successful. And, if you see yourself in any of this, my message to you is: You can do it, too. Just don’t expect it to be easy.

[For the record: I passed along a message to my colleague. If that someone did something like take initiative, I'd do a solid in return and recommend that a future application be considered. I may have learned my lesson but that someone should learn one too.]